Introduction Restaurant Email Marketing

Constant Contact have been from the email marketing video game since 1995. Throughout that time they’ve managed to become one of the email tools in the world. Restaurant Email Marketing

What Makes them special is that they’ve added features over the years that none of their competitors sport, such as surveys an event management tool, and social campaigns. These contribute to the list of options as well as automations and newsletters.

In Addition to these choices, they also boast a Market with over 400 apps and integrations which cater to even the most market of merchandise. Yet despite attributes and these numbers, interest in Constant Contact seems to be according to Google Trends. Enough reason for us to take a look at Constant Contact’s ins &amp; outs and check whether it is still relevant in the 21st century.

If you are choosing an email Marketing tool for your small business, you can do a lot worse than Constant Contact (which begins at $20 per month). If you want to test out a few of the features without committing a 6-day free trial is offered by the company. This review looks especially. Were it not for a few hiccups that were unexplained, Constant Contact could have been an easy pick for our option.

How does Constant Contact stack up against the Competition for companies with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database? It carries a top price that is $45-per-month. Email marketing tools have a limit on the number of messages you can send in a month but Constant Contact doesn’t.

Since our last appearance, Constant Contact has Added email autoresponders beyond these triggered by sign-ups, such as anniversaries and birthdays. You can send an email series to a set of contacts, like a day-by-day guide to getting started with your ceremony or follow-ups to an occasion. This works by segmenting your contacts into various folders and matching them up using autoresponders. The image library allows 2 GB of storage, with a maximum file size of 5MB. Users may also access stock photographs that are free and paid straight through Constant Contact. You can now interact with assistance via Twitter. Restaurant Email Marketing

Customer Support

Constant Contact is easy to use and has lots Of help options, beginning with the data icons helpfully located alongside choices and disciplines describing what they are Knowledge Base articles, and trainers available. Constant Contact has an Activity page that lists the status of different jobs, such as uploaded contacts, so you understand what’s going on in the background.

Phone support is not 24/7 but the hours are Still pretty generous, moving from 7 a.m. to 11 pm throughout the week, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. Chat is available, along with the agents will call you to ensure to have.

Pricing and Features

Constant Contact offers a number of plans Based upon how big your subscriber base. The least expensive plan is $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers and $45 for up to 2,500. A mid-tier plan costs $335 for 50,000 and $195 for 10,000 subscribers. Price-wise, it is not too different from Campaigner. You can sign up for other add-on services, such as EventSpot ($20 a month for a single event; $25 for up to five occasions ) for event registrations, and research ($10 per month) to conduct polls (all of which are included at no extra charge on the Email Plus program ). The Basic account comes to store images used from the mail campaigns with a Library. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Newsletter Archive ($5 per month) generates a widget which can be added to your site on which you may display links to around 100 emails. This is a if you want your clients to be able to see your older messages.

The free trial gives you access to all of These features for 60 days but you can send up to 100 mails. The trial is a superb way to get used to the platform to get a number of messages. When you are certain about the platform, update to the paid version and start blasting away. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is unusual in this area.

Campaigns

When you’re ready to create a newsletter, you May use the template to get started. The editing tool allows you tweak colors, pictures, and text messages. There is also a media library where you are able to store your own assets, such as company logos and other images. Restaurant Email Marketing

Once you’re satisfied with your newsletter, You can send it immediately or schedule it for later (in 5-minute periods, such as 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so on). We could not locate a recurring program to send messages on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis the way Campaigner doesto send messages based on the local time at the receiver’s location, as GetResponse can.

The Business also recently announced a new Attribute called Action Blocks, which enable marketers to include polls or RSVP cubes to regular emails. This permits recipients to answer messages with one click without having to depart the email inbox and also visit a web page.

Tracking Efforts

As Soon as You’ve sent a newsletter, then you are able to monitor By using the Reports tab its success. The dashboard displays the fundamentals, such as opens, clickthroughs, bounces, and unsubscribe requests. A handy bar graph shows open prices and a graph compares performance across multiple campaigns. Users can also select up to five mails to compare high speed results side by side. The report has a convenient Refresh button so you can see real-time outcomes. It is not like MailChimp where you have to manually load the webpages. When we opened mails and clicked on the links, they were registered nearly instantly.

The Resource Center offers links to Info about typical clickthrough rates by industry. You may also look at comparative metrics to figure out if your level of engagement with your customers is improving or declining over the previous three months. The mobile app is handy if you need to see the effort functionality from your mobile device.

Lists

There Are Lots of ways to add contacts to Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually sort addresses into a type, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT), import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other (CRM) tools.

When we used the shape Speech, we received an error message but it didn’t say what had gone wrong. We were prompted to hit on the last button to go back and fix the issue but we could not because the page had expired from our browser (Firefox) cache. After a few attempts, the entire webpage crashed. This was an odd experience, to say the least. Constant Contact has ensured us its infrastructure has greatly improved since our first test and that this is unlikely to occur again.

The file upload, Gmail import, and CRM Migration options, on the other hand, were secure and easy to use. We think most people would end up using one of these options. We monitored the upload progress under”Contacts: Activity” and was notified while the import was complete. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and disposable addresses. It’s too bad most services do not comply with the example of GetResponse$15.00 in GetResponse, which filters out known disposable domains. Constant Contact rather flags contacts that are inclined so the user can choose whether to remove or keep them to be transactional or other such email addresses.

Segments are based on which list you Select when saving the contacts but it’s also really easy to go back and change the list. In the Contact Managerwe clicked on the addresses we wanted to incorporate to a different list. A new feature allows users to choose a listing for contacts to be added to if they click a link within an email, the business said. This feature is available in all packages. Furthermore, it may be paired with an autoresponder so that, when a link clicks, a email is delivered to them. Constant Contact lets you assign tags to contacts, which can be helpful if you want to monitor things such as the way they signed up, even if they’re loyalty associates, or whatever else you might want to track. Restaurant Email Marketing

Our only quibble with the Contact Manager is That it is a pain to edit the consumer records. When we glued our list and cut, we just dropped in addresses. We didn’t have other areas, such as address or name. To bring this, we needed to load each record and update the fields. This was not that straightforward because the pages were slow to load in our testing. Since we could see the whole list in Contact Manager, it would have been nice to be able to simply click on the lost field, input, and just keep going down the page. Lesson learned: Be sure to have each the applicable fields before uploading the titles populated in the listing.

Constant Contact also enables you to produce forms That clients can use to sign up for newsletters and emails. These forms can be hosted on your site or on Constant Contact’s servers. You can segment the users based on if they used alternative procedures or the form, which may be helpful. The business also recently announced a brand new signup form editor that is intended to permit users to produce inline forms that can be embedded on a site as well as pop-up forms which could be customized to show after a fixed amount of time or when a visitor tries to leave the web site, the company said.

Constant Contact demands you to confirm that You have approval from your record! As there is absolutely no way to confirm you’ve got consent from each person receiving messages sent to that address you also can not use set addresses such as sales @ or advertising @ addresses or distribution lists. You can make autoresponders, listed under the Generate button, to send when a user is added to some list. We used the templates to build a Welcome newsletter to new subscribers.

Drawbacks

Constant Contact generally feels like a Professional stage but its arbitrary error messages were disconcerting. This the tool is strong, and for small companies Constant Contact is a good way to get started. We wish it provided flexibility in the scheduling of autoresponders of campaigns and creation in particular. Restaurant Email Marketing

If you don’t want these extra features, But then Constant Contact is an excellent option. If you want just a little bit more flexibility in your marketing strategy, then check out email advertising Editors’ Choices Campaigner and MailChimp instead.

Automation

Because Constant Contact only offers seven Different kinds of marketing automation works does not want to refer to itself as a advertising and marketing automation suite that is traditional. Rather, Constant Contact likes to inform prospects that it’s a cross between email advertising and marketing automation or what it calls”email automation”

That’s because, unlike other tools, such as Editors’ Choice marketing automation platforms Pardot and HubSpot, Constant Contact doesn’t doesn’t offer branching logic. It focuses on two triggers to begin automation campaigns. For instance, you can begin an automation workflow whenever someone accomplishes a landmark, such as a birthday or anniversary as a customer or joins a list. But you can’t change automationsbased on whether someone opened an email, forwarded an email, or clicked on a link inside the body of this email.

Automation platforms more smart and, well, automatic, compared to marketing tools, make life more personalized and easier for entrepreneurs for customers. Additionally, Constant Contact does not offer A/B testing (they do provide subject line A/B testing), no search marketing addition, and also the limited workflows it is possible to create don’t offer drag-and-drop builders, which are pretty much standard nowadays. If you require automation for first and second interactions with customers, then Constant Contact is a automation program. But if you would like flexible workflows and innovative sequencing that adjust to your clients’ specific activities Constant Contact is not strong enough to compete in the marketing automation space.

Wrap-up

As Constant Contact themselves reiterate through their website, they are a tool for small businesses. And, as such, it’s well worth assessing them. As stated previously, they definitely have a lot of the fundamentals covered to satisfy most small businesses, and we’d recommend them highly if it had been as simple as that. Restaurant Email Marketing

These days, the Matter, is that there are plenty of email Tools that offer even greater than Constant Contact, and for a lot less cash. This includes not just features, but also user experience. In fact, for the amount you pay with Constant Contact, you might find yourself using tools such as GetResponse and ActiveCampaign.

They do pick up things Due to their decent deliverability rates, integrations (particularly social websites integrations), also for allowing different access levels for separate users. With recent enhancements to marketing automation and coverage, it will seem like they’re making an effort. But their lack of features, such as marketing automation, makes it hard to recommend over others at their price point. Restaurant Email Marketing